September 19, 2003
A long take on Dia:Beacon
Here is a long, informal take on Dia:Beacon written as a letter to a friend with whom I have a two-person reading group that focuses on art criticism.
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I reread some reviews of Dia:Beacon and, surprisingly enough, found myself agreeing with some of Jed Perl's comments in the September 1 New Republic (the article is no longer accessible online.) (Can you imagine agreeing with him? I couldn't until about half an hour ago.) As I mentioned, I was wary of the almost universal praise heaped upon the museum by critics who often bare their fangs in the face of such huge institutional moves and presentations. Kimmelman devoted about 10,000 words to the museum across two or three articles, contradicting himself several times in the process; Suzaan Boettger set up a field of historical landmines in her comments on Artnet; Saltz made good points in the Voice though I disagree with his assessment of several artists; Hal Foster managed to pen 1,800 words in the London Review without developing an idea in full. (Though I do give him credit for approaching two rather interesting ones at the end of his text.) Time Out and New York no longer register in my mind so I assume their responses were in line with the others. With Perl, I had to do a lot of forest-clearing in his text on Matthew Barney and Beacon, but there are two trees that I wanted to leave standing:
"Modern art...has never before been as widely accepted as it is today. Everybody is now perfectly comfortable with the idea that complexity and intricacy are built into art's very powers of seduction. But if the mainstreaming of modern art represents a triumph, it is a confusing triumph, for the seemingly wholesale acceptance of new work has a way of riding roughshod over the very perplexities that give an artist's private view its heat, its depth. [...] The audience that has accepted everything will never really see anything."
"The museum, with gorgeous natural light pouring in through lofty skylights, takes the old modern dream of reshaping the world according to the artist's ultra-ascetic specifications to a level of polish that threatens to crush all artistic imagination. Luxurious asceticism is offered as a production value, an atmospheric effect."
The two go together. The first quote mostly concerns Barney's hermeticism, though Perl later makes a distinction between complex (Barney) and reductive (Dia:Beacon) opacities, panning both. His point is borne out by Kimmelman calling these artists "The Greatest Generation" in his Times Magazine cover story: museum-goers who visited Dia:Beacon after reading Kimmelman's puff piece probably could not help but be awed by the artworks on view. The problem is, as Jerry said, these artists are definitely not a "generation." The work itself is uneven and sometimes done a disservice by its installation. (Critics who toed the party line of Louise Bourgeois' placement on an upper floor as the "madwoman in the attic" neglected to notice how sterile her sculptures look when given as much space--between each object and in the still-overwhelming gallery--as they are at Beacon. Her "madwoman" art deserves a claustrophobic presentation, something a viewer only begins to feel in the room occupied by her giant Spider, whatever you think of it as an artwork.) Will these details be noticed by visitors bombarded by sometimes-unwarranted praise prior to arrival and the "luxurious asceticism" in the galleries?
Maybe I should interject my own take on the museum, which I visited a little more than a month ago with several friends who have varying levels of interest in recent art. I am already an ardent fan of many of these artists, and also found the experience of moving through its alternately room-sized and gargantuan halls bordering on the sublime. Dia has done these artists a service rarely rendered, no matter the generation: it has made a concerted effort to understand and present the work on its own terms. Heiner Friedrich, the current board, Michael Govan, and Lynne Cooke are all to be praised for that. It is their dedication to these artists--nevermind the idiosyncracies and gaps in the collection--that allows for extended reflection on the merits of their artwork. My visit to Dia:Beacon confirmed how I felt about several artists (Judd, Smithson, Nauman); altered how I felt about others for worse (Chamberlain) or better (Kawara, Ryman); and utterly transformed my view of Fred Sandback. For the twenty-some-odd dollars it takes to get up there, get inside, and get back to the city, I certainly got a lot for my money.
Given that the museum is what Perl calls a "Minimalist temple," I think that Boettger is right in saying: "Attention shifts, then, to the placement and installation of their works and to the architectural environment." That's why Bernd and Hilla Becher, not Bourgeois or Nauman as other critics have said, seem the odd couple out: theirs, along with Agnes Martin, is just about the only art in the museum that makes no attempt to engage the space of building itself, the only art that does not have at least some three-dimensional sculptural presence. (I am excluding Palermo and Kawara from this statement by virtue of the former's sculptural work and the way the latter altered the room in which his paintings are presented, even if I think the gesture itself is a little too New-Agey for my taste.) The Bechers, who hover between the Minimalism and proto-Conceptualism favored by Dia, become a sort of non-entity in this context. The same can be said of Walter De Maria, whose sculpture becomes invisible in the twin football-sized entrance galleries he chose for himself. (I would rather have seen the metal floor sculpture Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World recently on view in Rotterdam.)
Everyone else galvanizes some kind of response, whether it be the rapt pleasure I took in Judd's fifteen immaculately fabricated wooden boxes or the disappointment in Chamberlain's crushed-metal Miami Vice-colored works including the really sad shrub The Privet (1997). I've seen many beautiful early Chamberlain sculptures, so I think there is some truth to Saltz's lament at the artist's decline. Smithson, who is not very well represented by Dia's holdings and was given short shrift by several critics, nonetheless does a lot with a little. Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1967; view two) is one of the most beautiful pieces in the museum. Despite the associations one makes with the late 1960s and broken glass or its relationship to the rest of Smithson's oeuvre, it can also be read on the formal level so much of the other work engages. Did you notice the way each fragment reflected the clerestory windows and the kaleidoscopic effect when one moved around the piece while focusing on those reflections?
Taking Boettger's assertion as a maxim, Sandback comes away the biggest winner. His site-specific installation truly engages the space: it is his taut string sculptures that, running in a row of five pairs, show you just how high up Beacon's ceiling is. It is walking through and over his sculptures that emphasizes with greatest clarity the phenomenological experience of Minimalist art. It is his pared-down use of color that provides a counterpoint from the resolute colorlessness of Flavin, Ryman, and Martin. The formal rigor, understated elegance, and insistent presence of his works here really drives home the loss that his recent passing means to the art world. I wish I had taken the opportunity to know his art better while he was alive.
All the ink spilled over its opening has taught us the How of Dia:Beacon. We know the Heiner Friedrich and Leonard Riggio story. Now that the museum has been open for four months and everyone has initially weighed in on it, I hope we as critics can begin to explore the Why. Boettger and Foster take baby steps in this direction. Despite not wanting to read the details of Heizer's disparaging of Smithson in a review of Dia:Beacon (something I'd love to know more about but I think should be kept in Boettger's Earthworks book), I give her credit for being the only one to ask what the art meant at the time of its creation and how that meaning has shifted over the last thirty to forty years. I assume that Foster's two aforementioned good ideas--the Beacon artists as a sublime Hudson River School II and the "plastered over contradictions" of reinserting this art into an industrial context--will be borne out in an essay that will be collected in a book to be published at a later date. I, too, need to do this kind of thinking. Do you have any initial thoughts?